Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership

This discussion reminds me of the obscurity or paradoxicality of the whole baseline project. The obscurity is:What is it to do? The paradox comes from the usual answer: to determine the present state of the language. But, of course, the present state of the language is -- by definition -- just that specified in CLL (after typos are corrected, discovered inaccurate statements clarified, and the definitive version of xorlo added). So, where is the research? The escape from the paradox is to say that what is sought is a report on what is currently accepted as Lojban (by whom is left somewhat open -- perhaps the committee or Robin?). But this goes against the whole point, since it involves a constantly shifting target and standard: what goes uncriticized nowadays was once rejected or at least suspected, so both the language as used and the tastes of the referees are in flux (and not guaranteed in agreement if there is more than one). While no changes can be suggested, let alone approved, until the baseline is done, countless changes might be (and surely have been) made since the process began, almost all without discussion or approval by any body. So, in what sense is what is to be described the Lojban(s since some changes have gone equally in several directions)? In retrospect, it might have been better to allow changes through a careful process from the get-go, building up a cumulative description as we went along. There would then at least have been some control (beyond the annoying scolding that we can't suggest that yet, when the end of yet was clearly nowhere in sight and changes were going on all the time anyhow). But we didn't do that.

Lojbab has presented a different scenario, in effect. CLL was not a specification, he says, and what the baseline is is a specification (it is not perfectly clear what that all means in the light of several -- unfortunately non-equivalent -- grammars). That is, apparently, that the baseline is to fill out -- with examples and other commentary -- all the details that CLL merely sketched in broad strokes (not a description that applies to CLL very handily). that is, the baseline project is to find out what CLL meant -- or, rather, has come to mean -- to people who claim to using Lojban. The problem is one of control again: if CLL was not specific, then there are a range of possible meanings and how are we to decide which one is right? That is, establishing the baseline is already doing what the baseline was to serve as basis for: establishing changes in the language. And so the circle goes on. The most we can actually do is report on what users actually do (somehow skipping mistakes of various sorts) and come up with a description of a Lojban (or several), but not of Lojban. Until someone declares that one of the things come up with is the real thing, which will ot be a unanimous decision, of course, since it will not be either CLL Lojban (which it turns out did not exist as such) or a new version arrived at in an approved way.

All that being the case, some body, consisting of people who actually do the work, needs to do something along the lines laid out over the decades -- or along some other effective lines. Or we can go on as a squabbling group, boasting about a language we don't have, with properties what we do have doesn't have, recruiting (under somewhat false pretences) ever more people who deviate ever further from a nonexistent norm. Well, that is a language, after all, though not quite what anyone seems to have in mind.

On Tuesday, May 20, 2014 1:42 PM, "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:

On 5/20/2014 2:05 PM, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> Otherwise I again agree with Lojbab that first we need the stuff done.
> I'm not sure the current BPFK Sections in the wiki are a good place for
> finishing the baseline. I'd prefer one single document, e.g. "CLL,
> service edition, alpha version, only for BPFK and with lots of mistypes"
> rather than a bunch of mostly not-connected pages in the wiki.

The concept of the BPFK sections is to have a standard
specification-type format, ideally supported with references to text
and/or discussions of anything controversial. CLL is not written as a
specification - rather it was an explanatory document. One chapter, the
selma'o catalog near the end is a pared down version of the originally
intended specification, but John Cowan couldn't figure out how to write
such a document absent a dictionary, and an overview of the grammar.

Once CLL was done, the questions seemed to be of the sort that could
only be answered by a document such as the BPFK sections (though various
other intermediate products were envisioned to document the discussions
and controversies - search the archives for the "elephant" which was
John's version of such an intermediate.

I believe that most of what hasn't been documented at all, are the
sections which have little controversy, as to what the status quo ante
actually is (or which had seen little usage ante-BPFK, so no one knew
whether there was controversy).

Having the language documented as a specification, makes it much easier
to revise CLL as an explanation of the key elements of the specification
(there is no need for CLL to have examples of every kind of sumti used
as a termset, while arguably such would appear in the BPFK sections for
termset cmavo showing the interaction of various elements.)

The other thing to bear in mind is that CLL is a book currently in
publication. If we don't have an agreed-upon replacement when we run
out of copies, we will return to the state that existed a few months ago
when Amazon.com ran out of copies. The book is considered
"out-of-print" (and many will therefore think that the language is as
"dead" as Volapuk no matter how large the online community), and various
profit-seekers advertise copies of the book for hundreds of dollars.

Thus CLL needs to be updated as a book to be published independently and
possibly asynchronously of the formal language
specification/configuration management process (which need not be
concerned with issues like formatting, pagination, and indexing that are
important in a book rather than a set of web pages)

lojbab

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